This morning I received Tom Kenyon’s latest “A Hathor Planetary Message” entitled Escalation of Chaotic Nodes and the Dismantling of 3-D Reality. (Note: For those unfamiliar with Tom Kenyon, Tom is a contemporary spiritual teacher and a highly accomplished sound healer. If you have never read any of Tom’s channelings (or listened to his sound healings), I highly suggest you consider doing so. You can find his website here.) Like many others, I consider Tom’s channelings of The Hathors (a group of interdimensional, intergalactic beings who assist humanity’s evolution on Earth) one of the most informative sources of contemporary spiritual information.

Given where we are in our planetary evolutionary cycle, many of the Hathor messages that Tom has channeled over the past few years have been about the ever-increasing difficulty of the challenges facing us as Earth-bound, spiritually-evolving, human beings.

But this latest one is… well, it’s a bit of a doozy.

The following is a passage from this latest channeling that made a particular impression on me because of the soundness and usefulness of the insights and advice given:

Without mincing words, to use one of your phrases, we would say you are entering one of the more difficult passages of planetary transformation.

At this fork in the road, one path leads to self-destruction, madness, despair and hopelessness while the other fork leads to a deeper connection with your interdimensional or spiritual nature. It is this fork in the road we wish to explore.

It is not an either/or proposition. Many of you who possess a transcendent and interdimensional or spiritual sense of yourself may find yourselves, from time-to-time, on the path to madness and self-destruction in spite of your self-knowledge.

…

In its simplest terms the requirement to successfully make this passage through the escalation of Chaotic Nodes is deep authentic contact with your interdimensional or spiritual nature and the self-renewal that arises from such contact.

There are two things that particularly strike me about this communication.

The first is the assertion that the fork in the road is “not an either/or proposition”.

Although this statement is pretty much true in every circumstance where we find ourselves confronting a life decision (i.e. a “fork in the road”), the reality is that we nonetheless often approach these moments attached to the belief that once a decision is made we are stuck with it forever.

Thankfully, though we may at times forget it, life simply does not work that way. If it did, there would be no such thing as redemption or forgiveness (let alone love and compassion), and we would have all been long ago banished to burn in the infernal flames for all of eternity. My imagery here may be a bit dramatic, but certainly no more dramatic than the belief that we are forever stuck with our poor or ignorant choices.

Furthermore, no decision that we ever make about how we live our lives has a totally and completely uniform effect on us. Our choices almost always are, like the underlying intentions that give rise to them, decidedly mixed. Spiritual ascendance, like health, is not an event. It is a process. And at any given moment in that process, we are a mix of light and shadow — good and bad, conscious responses and unconscious reactions, adult and child. Or, in the imagery of the Hathor’s message, self-destructive AND self-preserving. The relative proportions may change, but we are always a mix.

Which leads to the other assertion from this communication that struck me — the suggestion that in order to successfully make it through these Chaotic Nodes the requirement is “deep authentic contact with your interdimensional or spiritual nature”.

Notice that nowhere in there does it say anything about judging, berating or castigating ourselves because we engage in self-destructive behaviors.

Just like any reasonable person would not expect perfect behavior at all times from human beings, neither does God. God is not keeping score. In fact, no one else of interest is really keeping score (and if they are, consider that we tend to call that type of behavior petty, at best).

God knows (better than we do) the difficulties of moving through some Earth experiences. And even a moderately self-aware person can understand that the only reason we engage in self-destructive behaviors is because we are suffering, we are in pain, and in those moments we are just looking for some sense of relief. And just like any reasonable person would, our higher power anticipates and expects that as humans beings going through these kinds of challenges we WILL, at times, choose to engage in self-destructive behaviors.

Of course, not judging ourselves does not mean we are absolved from taking responsibility for our actions. In fact, it is very important that we take responsibility for everything we do. It is how we come to truly know what it is that we are choosing. But in a world where we already know and expect that we will make mistakes, it would be irrational to believe that “taking responsibility” means feeling badly about ourselves.

In fact, a good rule of thumb is that when we no longer judge ourselves as bad because of our choices, that is when we know we’ve truly taken responsibility. We might feel regret, grief or perhaps even a sense of guilt about our choice or its consequences. But there is no feeling badly about ourselves — there is no self-judgment. If there is judgment, it means we are still in resistance - resistance to taking responsibility.

So if in response to life’s stresses and Chaotic Nodes you find yourself choosing self-destructive behaviors (and we all do), take a deep breath, take another deep breath, and then remember: it is not the end of the world; you are not stuck with your choice forever; and no one is keeping score. And if you’re patient and just wait for a bit (in my experience, usually no more than a few minutes), you will find that life soon enough brings you the opportunity to make a different more loving or more self-preserving choice about something in your life. (And if you “blow” that one, don’t worry. The universe contains an inexhaustible number of opportunities to choose.)

But above all, don't waste your time judging yourself for your self-destructive behaviors. Judging ourselves and others is not what we were put here to do.

Our Earthly experience is a school for our soul, and we are here to learn who we really are (i.e. what we are “made of”) through the choices we make. And when the choices seem to get harder, it is only because we have advanced to the next grade-level.